Current Research Projects
Design of a Diversified Internet
The Internet has fallen victim to its own stunning success.
The interplay of the end-to-end design of IP and the vested interests of competing stakeholders has led to its growing ossification.
Alterations to the Internet architecture that address its fundamental deficiencies or enable new services have been restricted to incremental changes.
The slow pace of this process stifles innovation and the adoption of disruptive technology.
This project seeks to develop a diversified internet architcture
in which a plurality of diverse network architectures to coexist on
a shared physical substrate.
Diversification mitigates the ossifying forces at work in the
current Internet and enables continual introduction of innovative
network technologies.
This work is at a fairly early stage.
These two
position papers
[Hotnets-04,
divInternet-05]
detail the
arguments for a diversified internet and outline
some of the technical challenges that must be addressed
to turn the vision of a diversified net into a reality.
Additional details can be found in this slide presentation
[HotI-04].
The Open Network Lab
The Open Network Laboratory is a resource designed to enable experimental evaluation of advanced networking concepts in a realistic operating environment.
The laboratory is built around a set of open-source, extensible, high performance routers, which can be accessed by remote users through a Remote Laboratory Interface (RLI).
The RLI allows users to configure the testbed network, run applications and monitor those running applications using built-in data gathering mechanisms.
Support for data visualization and real-time remote display is provided.
The RLI also allows users to extend, modify or replace the software running in the routers' embedded processors and to similarly extend, modify or replace the routers' packet processing hardware, which is implemented largely using Field Programmable Gate Arrays.
The routers included in the testbed are architecturally similar to high performance commercial routers, enabling researchers to evaluate their ideas in a more realistic context than that provided by PC-based routers.
More details about ONL can be found at